Lapins "Dueling Fundamentals"

[CJBlaha]

I got my hands on a new method book written by Alex Lapins (Univ. of TN - Knoxville) titled "Dueling Fundamentals". He wrote it with the intention of each exercise being played as a duet (hence "dueling") and I've been using it solo and duo.
I have to say this book is really well thought out, challenging without being exhausting and is a fresh point of view on long tones/flexibility/pitch/blend/etc. I've really enjoyed getting to know this book and look forward to playing from it even more.
I have no hesitation recommending to the board that you grab a copy to enjoy.

Alex made a YouTube video to demo some of the exercises.
https://youtu.be/MnxtRZF_zSo" target="_blank

Cheers!
Chris

[Heavy_Metal]

I liked what I heard, so I ordered a copy.

[tubalex]

Thanks for the interest!

I’ll be writing the euphonium version this fall, and easier “student” versions for both instruments next spring.

Have fun!

[Leland]

These are cool. Listening is such a big deal, and I don't think enough players use bread-and-butter exercises -- so they don't have to use so much attention for reading notes -- while paired up to hear intervals.

[Oldschooltuba]

Well done. I am sure I will order a copy. Fundamentals is where it is at. Hard work on exercises like these build a solid foundation that makes all other playing so much easier. Air is the backbone that must be used properly to accomplish this and move your playing forward.

[Mark]

I bought the book and received it today. Looks very nice. A great addition would be a CD/MP3 of each part so you could use the book by yourself.

[tubalex]

Hi Mark, thanks for the note. A few reasons why that didn't happen:

Almost every duet in this book is an adaptation of a single-voice exercise I came up with over the past few years, using a metronome and a drone for reference or time and pitch. It's buried in the opening narrative about "how to use this book", but I think it's pretty easy to find the one or two "home patterns" in each duet, and get quite a lot out of them with a metronome and drone. There are three out of twenty five duets where that's not exactly the case, but for most of the book it's pretty easy to make it a single-person event.

It's also in one of the opening statements in the book that I advocate doing fundamentals by yourself most of the time. That's because everyone needs to work on different things with different levels of focus at different points in their development. In order for a reference recording to be useful to everyone I'd need to record everything at at least three and preferably five tempi, from very slow to very fast. As it's a duet book with two voices per study and twenty five studies, that's 150-250 tracks to record to make it as widely useful as I intend it to be. Otherwise the recording tempi would either be too difficult or too easy for almost everyone, and if it did happen to hit a "sweet spot" for some people, that value would fluctuate over time. The metronome-and-drone approach doesn't flow as well and isn't as much fun as the two-person approach, but it's how I work on fundamentals nine times out of ten, and I've gotten a lot out of it through a lot of fluctuation in my own abilities.

Finally, as I see this book as an auxiliary addition to the standard fundamentals books, I wanted to keep the price point low, and including recordings, especially that many recordings, would push this book to a price point that I think would defeat its purpose for a lot of people.

I hope this makes sense. I thought quite a lot about this and it does make sense to me. Several people I respect tremendously have mentioned that they will have their students record one voice and play along with that recording. They were actually pretty enthusiastic about that approach...

Thanks, again, for your interest!